ARSC T3E Users' Newsletter 167, May 4, 1999

Robert Numerich Talk at ARSC on Co-Array Fortran, 2pm May 6

Bob Numrich of SGI will be visiting ARSC on Thursday, May 6, and will give a presentation on Co-Array Fortran at 2pm in 204 Butrovich Building.

Bob, together with John Reid of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, designed Co-Array Fortran. This simple syntactic extension to Fortran 95 converts it into a parallel language. It is implemented in the CF90 compiler for the T3E, and has been available to ARSC users since last September.

A full description of Co-Array syntax appeared in Numrich and Reid (1998), Co-Array Fortran for Parallel Programming, ACM Fortran Forum, volume 17, no 2, pp 1-31.

Review of 1999 PTools Annual Meeting

The Parallel Tools Consortium (PTools) 1999 Annual Meeting took place at NCAR, April 19-21.

It brought about 80 people from the vendor, user, and academic communities together. The resulting perspectives sparked lively, informative discussion.

For instance, on the issue of open source, some lauded the power of the internet community to generate code and rapidly fix bugs. Others observed that a gate keeper is essential to verify and integrate changes and to prevent feature bloat. Others stated that software engineers must get paid for their efforts--and observed that the pool of parallel tools users/developers may be too small for the open source model to work (as it has for linux, for instance).

Another example: On the issue of common tools across multiple vendor platforms, most agreed that users are more likely to use tools if they're consistent across all platforms. Some observed that this model is already working (witness Totalview, VAMPIR, and various standards). Others noted that the survival of vendors, and the survival of software divisions within companies, is often tied to differentiating themselves--not to duplicating each other's products. (But, someone asked, does such differentiation apply to secondary products like parallel tools, or only to hardware?)

Such dialog helps improve understanding throughout the community. It helps PTools realize its mission: "to take a leadership role in defining, developing, and promoting parallel tools that meet the specific requirements of users who develop scalable applications on a variety of platforms."

GUARD is a tool for "relative debugging." This compares data between two executing programs. It was devised to aid the testing and debugging of programs that are either modified in some way, or are ported to other computer platforms.

The speaker described his experience using VAMPIR to successively (and successfully) improve a particular algorithm and implementation for task distribution.

He commented that "embarrassingly parallel" problems are not always good candidates for MPP platforms, as they might be solved more cheaply on workstation clusters. Medium-grained problems generally make better use of expensive HPC resources.

SLOGging Towards Teraflops: A Strategy and Library to enable Jumpshot and Other Tools to Cope with Gigabyte Event Log files
Ewing "Rusty" Lusk (Argonne National Laboratory)

"SLOG" is "Scalable LOGging". The structure of SLOG trace files enables the viewer, Jumpshot, to produce various overviews of the entire volume of data. Users will be presented with greater detail as they zoom in, rather than seeing an expanded view of the same level of detail.

Announcements

IEEE CS Task Force on Cluster Computing

New IEEE group. From the web site intro:

> The TFCC will act as an international forum to promote cluster
> computing research and education. It will also participate in helping
> to set up and promote technical standards in this area. The Task Force
> will be concerned with issues related to the design, analysis,
> development and implementation of cluster-based systems. Of particular
> interest will be cluster hardware technologies, distributed
> environments, application tools and utilities, as well as the
> development and optimisation of cluster-based applications.
>
> The TFCC will sponsor professional meetings, publish newsletters and
> other documents, set guidelines for educational programs, as well as
> help co-ordinate academic, funding agency, and industry activities in
> the above areas. The TFCC plans to organize an annual conference and
> hold a number of workshops that would span the range of activities
> sponsored by the Task Force. In addition, a bi-annual newsletter would
> be published to help IEEE/Computer Society members keep abreast of the
> events occurring within this field.
>
>
http://www.dcs.port.ac.uk/~mab/tfcc/

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